Domain Tasting As Millions Of Domains Registered Without Paying For Them

Domain Tasting As Millions Of Domains Registered Without Paying For Them

John E, Media Relations Adviser http://easily.co.uk – Domain name registration, register your low cost domain name today! Search quickly and easily, all major extensions and no catches.

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Since the beginning of 2006 the amount of domain names that were registered without paying for them was increasing to exceptional heights and a growing cause for concern for governing bodies like ICANN for international domain names and Nominet for the United Kingdom. Millions of domain names registered were not being paid for. For the month April 2006 out of 35 million registered domain names, 32 million were part of a scheme and never paid for.

These practices were called domain kiting and domain tasting. Domain kiting is the practice of registering and deleting a domain name over and over again within the five day grace period, so that the registrant can, basically, own the domain name without paying for it. Domain tasting is the process of using the five day grace period to register a batch of domains in order to determine which ones are worth keeping. The registrant determines the ones to keep, while deleting the rest without paying for these domains that were initially registered.

In August, 2008 ICANN changed the policy and fee structure to put an end to these practices. To combating the abuse of domain name registrations, Google announced at the same time that domain names younger than five days will not receive any advertising from the Google Adsense program. Since Adsense was one of the most used affiliate programs to monetize domains registered by domain tasters, this in combination with the new ICANN fees had to stop domain tasting dead in its tracks.

While this change effectively put an end to domain kiting, since fees now apply to every domain registration, it has only proven to be a small inconvenience for domain tasters.
Due to the sheer volume of the domain names registered, the fees for deleting domains within the grace period are small compared to the total costs involved. This makes domain tasting a profitable practice still and the fees in place only eliminate the small players in this field, while the large organizations still profit from registering hundreds if not thousands of domains without ever paying for it, keeping only the ones they can monetize using alternatives for Google Adsense, like Adbrite and other advertising agencies that will take the ad views.

Nominet in the United Kingdom came out with new rules and regulations, threatening to end contracts with registrars that persist in the practice. This has effectively ended the practice of abusing the system utilizing domain tasting to use domain names without ever paying for them.

Though it is still possible at least for international domain names to be profitable using domain tasting tactics a report from Message Labs intelligence dating from September 2009 clearly shows that the practice has practically come to a stop. The report speaks of ‘the end of domain tasting’. This is not entirely true. It is a fact that the market for practices like these has stopped growing, but it still happens. The fact remains that for international domains governed by ICANN domain tasting can still be a profitable tactic if utilized correctly and should be closely watched, because it is still possible to make a profit from it when it is done on a large enough scale.

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